“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The equating of jokes and comedy here is an affront for anyone who has explored different avenues of comedy in any way. The analysis is fine and even interesting for (as others have pointed out) one specific type of joke but just flippantly calling that all of comedy is very jarring as it is obviously wrong. I just completed…
Comedy is a complex superstructure. I think the site has a probably-correct description of the ground-floor basis of that superstructure. But the rest of the structure is where the magic is. I describe this "ground-floor basis" not as "comedy is search" but "comedy is learning." One of the first things babies laugh at is object permanence. But you quickly get into forms of comedy that are much more than the formula d…
With search, I understand it as a process of learning, where diff search strategies create different learnings. Maybe laughter is a strategy of search, or what the algorithm feels like from the inside attention head...?
And search feels like moving around a tree or maybe graph (moving thru graph from known origin to unknown extremities, this is maybe tree-like in any meaningful local sense). Anyhow, searches being depth-first vs breadth-first with attention feels related.
Thinking through your comment has me reflecting on the distinction between depth-first vs breadth-first comedy, and if that even makes sense :)